


Seven Bribes for Seven Bothers

by executrix



Category: Blakes7
Genre: AU, Gen, Pre-TWB
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-09
Updated: 2011-06-09
Packaged: 2017-10-20 06:29:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/209752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time there was a maiden who was not yet Supreme Commander.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Bribes for Seven Bothers

1.  
Once upon a time, there was a poor woodcutter named Nikolaus Servalan. He and his wife had three daughters. The oldest, christened Rosamunde, was beautiful and sweet-natured, with long golden hair and sapphire eyes. The middle girl, christened Hypatia, was brilliant and scholarly. The youngest, christened Irene (who, vide infra, had little taste for christenings) was…neither.

And she learned that for all her sisters' beauty and intellect, no one valued them very highly. Partially, Nikolaus blamed his daughters for being girls, but mostly he blamed his wife. After all, his bastards were all sons.

Later on, she sent him a card every year (well, both years—the life expectancy on Ursa Prime is remarkably short) to thank him for inspiring her to strive and achieve.

2.  
When Irene was seven years old, Nikolaus failed to pay his taxes, so the Baron's men came and took him away and threw him into the dungeon.

The woodcutter's wife (who had been christened Agnes, although to the extent anyone ever thought of her it was as the woodcutter's wife) grabbed Irene's long plait of hair. "I'll spin it into a rope, and your father can pull himself up by it and escape," she said.

"Why not your hair?" Irene asked. "He's your husband, after all."

"After all I've done for that man!" she said.

"And after how little he's done for you," Irene said. "Why anybody's hair? Why not just leave him to it?"

Agnes fetched her daughter a box on the ear with the scissors. "A woman's nothing without a man," she said. "And don't you ever forget it." She began to snip through the thick braid. "Mind you," she said, "A woman's long hair is her glamour. No one will ever love you, after this."

"Why me, then? Why not the others?"

"Oh, I couldn't spoil Rosamunde's beauty," Agnes said. "And Hypatia will need all the help she can get—clever girls are always a drug on the market. As for you, you'll stay here and take care of me. It's your duty."

"Hair grows back," Irene said. And she thought, {{A woman without a man is like a Phibian without a bicycle.}} But she didn't say it, her lifelong lack of taste for being at the sharp end of violence already having begun.

3\.   
When Irene was fourteen years old, an enchanter seized Hypatia and turned her into a sparrow.

"What can I do to free her?" Irene asked, and was relieved when the enchanter said that she could break the spell by living in a tower for seven years, spinning carded-off mouse fur into thread and then knitting it into a breastplate to protect the enchanter against the malign spells of other, more successful, enchanters. Anything to get out of the house.

As a special privilege, she was allowed to ease her task by spinning in the eyelashes that fell as she wept.

After two days in the tower, spinning day and night, she said, "Sod this for a game of soldiers," and resolved to run away to the Federation Space Academy, though it lay on the other side of the great river.

Hypatia flew home, telling the other birds she encountered on the way, "Hail, bird, blithe spirit thou never wert," but no one understood her.

Her parents were resigned to their fate—it would have taken an uncomfortably large dowry to get her off their hands—and at least this way she didn't eat much.

4\.   
"I have no coin to pay you with," she told the boatman.

"Sure you do, girlie," he said, with a wolfish leer that made her reconsider the wisdom of straying off the path.

"But I'm not a great lady," she said.

"Stands to reason you wouldn't be," he said, "Else there'd be knights on horseback guarding your honor. And if you've got brothers—"

"Not the right side of the blanket I don't," she said

"—I'll be long gone before they find out who's had your innocence."

"I'm not beautiful," she said.

"You don't look at the mantelpiece when you're poking the fire," he said. "There's my cabin, wait there and I'll come to collect as soon as the bales of cargo are loaded."

So she realized that, from then on, lovers would be her power. And she knew she would never be loved, but that was all right. It meant that whenever she paid someone's desire, she would be paying in Zerok gold.

5\.   
"I haven't got all day, you know," said the Supreme Commander.

"Here comes the other godmother now," the baby's mother said.

"Doesn't she know that feathers are so last year?" Servalan said, untwisting the boa from her neck and kicking it beneath the table. One of her high heels broke, so she stamped her foot until the other one broke too. "And stilettos." ("Oh, those never go out of style," her companion said, sotto voce.)

"I am the Fairy Peridot," simpered the vision in gilded, jeweled, and peacock-feather-embroidered chiffon, saved from lisping only by the absence of an "s". She stretched out one ballet-pump-shod foot triumphantly; she was naturally tall. "I've come to give the baby all the gifts: a fair face, a fond fate, a sweet temper."

"Travis!" Servalan said, pointing. The Lazeron ring flashed, and the guests stared aghast at the pile of toasted sprite.

The Supreme Commander stalked out. Because, just as no one is permitted to build anything in the Dome taller than the Parliamentary Palace, if Servalan can't have something, nobody else can either.


End file.
